What To Do???

 What do you do when the seven-year-old boy you're tutoring in math keeps saying "I'm too tired!" and laying his head down, or saying "This is boring!" and flopping onto the seat next to him at the table. ??

That's the dilemma I was in the other day. Granted, it was a Saturday, and the kid had been to a birthday party where he'd been running around at the park for two hours. 

First, I started with "skip counting". He was doing fine at this point. I had him write on a white board - by 2s, then 4s, which we had been doing the weeks before. He did those fine. Then I wanted to introduce him to counting by 3s (not knowing if his school teacher had already done this or not). He did fine, much to my surprise! But by this time he was starting to get bored and was writing with his left hand. The numbers were hard to read, so I had him say them out loud as he wrote them. 

Then we used dice to add to written out partial equations that either added up to or required subtracting numbers from to get to 11. It started out okay, but then he said, "this is boring." I let him take all the dice and roll them just for fun for a few minutes. He liked seeing what numbers he got, especially on the dice that had actual numbers on them, not dots. Then we discovered that one of these dice did not have a 6 on it, but it had two 1s. Manufacturing error, but entertaining for at least one minute. 

After half an hour, he was completely bored with math, and I'm supposed to tutor him for an hour. I also tutor him on another day of the week in reading, so I asked his mom if we could switch to reading. She said that was okay, and found two "Pig the Pug" books that he could read. He likes reading better than math, but he didn't really want to do that either. So I had to compromise and have him read a page, then I read a page, and so on. We FINALLY got through the hour, but it was a major struggle.  Hang in there, everyone! This too shall pass!